What we’re reading, week of 4/13

From NTEN…
A Five Step Program to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Web Pages
Following our ongoing discussion of getting the website right first, Avinash Kaushnik offers a five-step plan to analyze and improve website effectiveness. A must-read!

From A Small Change…
Office/Workplace Fundraising
Jason Dick writes about strategies for implementing a workplace giving program. For more, we recommend this MSNBC article, featuring ASI’s own Sarah Hoddinott.

From The Fundit…
Hugh Jackman’s $100K Twitter challenge
This week in brilliant uses of Twitter – Hugh Jackman offers a $100,000 donation to the organization of your choice, based on who can submit the best 140-character appeal. There’s still time to submit!

What we’re reading, week of 3/2

From NTEN Connect…
Nonprofits and Technology: An Interview with NTEN’s Holly Ross in the Artez Digital Fundraising Podcast Series
NTEN highlights a podcast featuring Holly Ross and Artez’s Philip King – two of iOn’s most oft-quoted authorities.

From Step By Step Fundraising…
Roundup: The Economy’s Impact on Nonprofits & What to Do About It
Sandra Sims continues cataloguing reflections from around the blogosphere on how the economy will affect nonprofits – this installment includes excerpts from the Denver Foundation, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Don Griesmann, the National Council of Nonprofits, Katya Andresen, onPhilanthropy and A Small Change. A great compendium!

From Frogloop…
10 Best Web Content Practices
A great tie-in to our recent post on the importance of good website strategy and design, Allyson Kapin offers her own ten best practices in this area.

Get the Website Right First

Last week, we caught an item on Twitter by Non-Profit Tech Blog’s Allan Benamer:

WARNING: social media is being oversold to nonprofits — they’d be better off getting their web sites done right

This sparked some dialogue with Anne Gentle of JustWriteClick. Anne’s take is that nonprofit websites need a “job description,” just like employees. “What do you want your website to do, and how do you measure its success at doing those tasks?”

We talked to Sara Hardison, product manager at ASI, to get her thoughts on the essentials of website design and development for nonprofits. Here’s what Sara had to say:

User Experience Strategy versus Technology

To begin with, information architecture/design needs to be framed in the larger context of User Experience Strategy. The best design and navigation elements and even features mean nothing if you don’t also have the content and focus to back it up.

Non-profits and associations often have multiple and not always complementary goals and audiences. Strategically, they have to contend with members, potential members, public education, industry education, groups within membership, press and media, lobbying/outreach, etc. It is very easy to get off track and try to be everything to everyone, and in effect, reach no one.

Because this is something that affects the entire organization, strategy gets lost amid compromised solutions, or the solutions focus on technology – which is much easier to sell internally – rather than coming up with a solid strategy. For example, it’s easier to say “we need a store to sell our publications,” rather than answer the questions “why is our publication relevant to a larger audience, what format should that take, how do we cross-promote?” It’s easier to say “we need social media tools,” rather than sit down and figure out  new ways to foster community and what that community has to offer, how to populate it, and who it would appeal to.

Small, Continual Improvements

Some organizations either want to spend all of their money on the technology, or don’t have a team strong enough to both implement and manage a web presence that has been aligned with a web strategy. Websites are living structures, and must be evaluated and tested regularly to see if they still align with the organization’s goals, and if the flow of navigation, features and content meet user needs as those goals evolve. Even small adjustments can have relatively large impacts – both good and bad – on  the user experience. At a for-profit company like Amazon, for instance, small changes could mean millions in revenue… which is why they iterate by piece and test, test, test.

Many organizations still think of adjustments to the website as a complete overhaul, not something that can be tackled in smaller doses. Iterative changes are usually more cost-effective, less risky, and easier to implement and test.

Where Social Media Comes In

There is definitely a role for non-profits at the forefront of social trends. Organizing and fostering communities and networks is at the core of what they do, after all. Membership associations are about bringing people together, either through events, career services, job leads, or general networking. Fundraising organizations bring people together around a common interest or goal. Within each of these organizations, there are those dynamic people who foster and feed that connectivity: chapter presidents, committee chairs, board members, active volunteers, real germinators if you will (Philip King would call them “sneezers“).  Many are too intimidated by the tools to really think about how they can harness their knowledge to effectively use social media. In this sense, social media is being “oversold” to organizations. Worrying about using new tools and technologies before figuring out the User Experience Strategy in general is like attempting to answer the how of web presence without an adequate understanding of the why.

What we’re reading, week of 1/26

From TechSoup…
Responding to Online Criticism: The Air Force Approach
Elliot Harmon discusses strategies for engaging effectively online with constituents and critics, offering this flowchart (courtesy Donor Power Blog) as an example. How many nonprofits actually have a strategy like this in place for responding to criticism?

From onLine…
Homepage: The Big Five
Garth Moore highlights the “big five” website design rules for nonprofit organizations. This topic has been discussed at length recently among bloggers and on Twitter,  and here at iOn we’ll be taking a more in-depth look at nonprofit website best practices next week.

From Beth’s Blog…
ROI (Results on Insights): Nonprofit Examples of How Listening Returns Value
Here it is, the payoff from that LinkedIn question! Beth showcases the answers she received from organizations about their social media “listening” strategy, and also invokes the Airforce flowchart as a comprehensive way for organizations to respond to social media discussions.